﻿﻿sol﻿-feace

(Circa 2001)

I’ve only played this game approximately one time. But for the good of the site, the review, and my humble fans, who are probably only here because they got bored with a different site, I will go into video-gaming hell and back, and back for more. But that’s because I’m an Extreme Idiot.Sol-Feace, or as I like to call it, Sol-Feces (Latin for Sun-Poop), is basically a normal space-shooter game like R-Type or the most famous shooter masterpiece ever, Zero Wing. And since I’ve never been very good at those, it looks like I’m in for another fun-filled joy ride. When I first turned it on and heard the narrator, I was like, “Oh my God, it’s James Earl Jones! Darth Vader is reading the introduction! This is gonna be the fucking greatest game ever!" I don’t know whether or not it was really him, but I swear, it sounded exactly like Mufasa talking about artificial intelligence taking over the future. He even talked slow like Mufasa. And whoever it was just read right past the word “befor” without even bothering to tell the game company that it was misspelled. Speaking of the game company, they’re called “Wolf Team”, which sounds less like a video game company and much more like something out of a Boy Scouts Jamboree or a crappy Nickelodeon game show.

The intro is pretty sweet. Even despite the fact that the girl’s thick English (?) accent, combined with the fuzzy sound quality of the Sega CD, made it impossible to understand what the hell she was saying. She’s like Brad Pitt in Snatch. The game didn’t come with an instruction booklet, so there are some things on the demo I can’t explain or do. But things like that never stopped me from playing Sewer Shark all the way to the painfully shitty end. *sob. Hey, neat! I knew before that my Sega CD was alive, but now it’s possessed. You know how sometimes, when you turn on your NES, it screws up and there are weird, disfigured blocks all over the screen? You know, blocks that look like messed up letters and half a Ninja Turtle face? Well, I never thought it could happen to a disk-based system, and I still don’t. But I just fucking saw it! There were weird squares scrolling up the screen, and I knew something was terribly wrong. But I took the liberty of watching the whole intro anyway. And I didn’t regret it. It was kind of like the normal intro… ON ACID!!! It was awesome! The words that Darth Vader spoke at the beginning looked like some form of alien writing. Or elvish. Which, inexplicably, led me to envision the dark and powerful Jedi master played by Billy Barty. Dwarf Vader. Then, there was a chick with no eyes, followed by a floating blue mouth chanting incantations in gibberish. I guess this proves that every Sega CD game there is, no matter how fun, is still a little bit evil.

On the second level of Sol-Feces, you fly to what appropriately looks like a city on a giant turd. (According to my spellcheck, “turd” is not a real word and neither is “spellcheck.”) In the third level, you’re supposed to “Enter into a sphere of artical solar gravity and pass through immediately.” I’m not sure why, or even what that means exactly, but I’ll do my best. Being the shooter that this game is, though, I’m assuming it means, “It’s a shooter… What the hell do you think you’re supposed to do?” The fourth level was planned by the “Wolf Team” janitor at the last minute to make the game longer. You now have to fly the opposite direction you’ve been flying. Unfortunately, Janitor Bob forgot to tell “Wolf Team” to turn your ship around so you can shoot in the direction you’re flying. Now it’s like driving on the freeway at night against the flow of traffic IN REVERSE. Thanks, Squirrel-Fucker Bob, but I’d rather have gone through the game without this level. And that’s only the beginning. Later, you go forward through the level, then back, and forward again. This keeps up until you win, die, or kick the Sega CD.*

*One time, like a year ago, my Sega CD was being really static-y, so I did what I would do to any appliance under the same circumstances. I smacked it upside it’s electronic head; apparently a bad idea when it’s trying to read a CD. It completely stopped working. I was like “Oh shit!” but there was nothing I could do, so I forgot about it. Recently I’ve been playing it and it works fine. It regenerated! True story.

As the ultimate pun for the title, Sol-Feces, which I made up, the fourth boss you have to beat is a living, breathing poo. But not like Mr. Hankey. This is an evil fucking poo! It has an eye and a brainstem and sharp, deadly teeth. Definitely not the kind of poo you want to see in your toilet. (Spellcheck says poo isn’t a word either. It’s a good thing computers don’t have to go to the bathroom. They have a very limited vocabulary, so they wouldn’t be able to convey what they’re trying to say. They’d have to say something like they need to “make feces.” Ha ha ha! Come to think of it, that’s pretty funny. From now on, I’m gonna start saying that.)

And just when I thought the evil Sega spirits had been exercised form the game, it goes and gets possessed again. During my 253rd time in the fourth level, instead of hearing the normal level music, I heard a haunting, ghostly silence. There was a sudden chill in the air. I wet myself. Then, to my horror, ALL THE SHORT MUSIC TRACKS STARTED PLAYING. One after the other. I couldn’t tell if it was game over, the beginning of a new level, or Cerberus howling from the gates of Hell!!! So I screamed and jumped out the window. As I was falling, I thought to myself ‘Hey, maybe I’m just overreact- OH GOD! MY LEGS!!’ I told the doctor it was a Dance Dance Revolution accident. He gave me a lollipop. After you beat the shit out of the poo, you get another mission where you have to “brow out the enemy’s Pluto base.” I guess this is the game’s special way of saying, “shoot more enemies.” In level six you get to “brow out the enemy’s last stand.” Either “brow out” is a saying I don’t know, or it’s Engrish* for “blow up.” Engrish seems to be very common in Sega shooter games, so I’m ruling in favor of that. Level five is almost impossible to beat, so it took me every life I had, along with about 400 continues, to beat it. When I died in level six, I wasn’t too alarmed. I figured oh well, I’ll just continue from here. Lucky for me, they don’t allow you to continue from level six. I was all “What the hell?? Ok, that’s fucking IT!!” I had gone through so much of this game’s shit, and then continued to do it all over again. I finally got past level five, and I’ve been playing for eight hours straight without the sleep I so well deserve. I lost interest about five hours ago, and I didn't even really want to play this game in the first place. I usually never cheat, but this time, it’s personal!!! This time I fucking EARNED it. Take that, Suck-Feace.

That’s right I cheated. (In case you can’t tell, I’m flipping you off right now.) Not invincibility, though, just level select. I didn’t even want to deal with level six, so I just went all the way to the seventh and final level. Fun Fact: when you die in the last level, they don’t even grace you with a “game over” song. There are three bosses in this level. The first boss I could beat just by farting on my controller. The second boss is almost as difficult as the fifth level. But the absolute final boss, in the tradition of every video game ever made during my childhood, is easy enough to be beaten blindfolded. I don’t get what was with games when I was a kid, but the hardest boss in all of them is the one right before the final boss. And now, the time has come to watch the ending I’ve worked so hard for. By now, I probably shouldn’t expect much, but I always do anyway. Really, all that happens is the girl mumbles something incoherently, and then the guy says, “It starts.” Not the greatest thing to say at the end of a game. A more appropriate thing to say would have been, “The end,” or even a speech about how this all could have been avoided by saving the rain forest. Not a terrible ending, but they could have made it last longer than 10 seconds. That would have been a good idea too.

RATING (OUT OF 10)

GRAPHICS: 9 I hope something as cool as the acid intro happens with every game I ever play from now on. I only gave the graphics a nine because I don’t believe in 10. 10 is Satan’s lucky number… err… plus four. And four is a Smurf’s lucky number. And there’s nothing worse than a satanic Smurf. Except maybe Dwarf Vader. He could kick a satanic Smurf’s ass. In fact, I should have my friend Kyle draw me a picture of that as soon as he’s done drawing Kiki’s Delivery Service vs. Harry Potter.SOUND: 5 For the most part, the sound is good. I like the music. It would have gotten a higher rating, too, if it weren’t for the whole demons-have-taken-over-the-fourth-level incident. And the mumbling chick scares me.PLAY CONTROL: 7 That’s the highest I can give any shooter, since I suck so bad at them. And since I’m writing the review, there’s nothing you can do about it, bitch.FUN: 7 It kept me entertained until I couldn’t stand it anymore. It really stopped being fun after I was doing it for the sole purpose of this review. But until then it was fun. Zero Wing is funner, though.* And I bet the ending is more worth it, too.

*I’ve now added funner to my spellcheck because if everybody uses it, it should already be a slang word, anyway.

OVERALL RATING: 7

All in all, it isn’t a bad game. It just has a few bugs and demons that weren’t quite worked out of the final version.

There’s not much I can say about the time I spent playing this game. I broke my legs, cheated, verbally flipped off my fans, witnessed Satan’s handiwork and even liked some of it. Ok, so maybe that’s a lot, but the point is this: err… uh… good games… umm… Good games are harder to review. So much harder in fact, that I kinda hope the next one sucks almost as bad as Sewer Shark. Almost.